GLSL Hacker 0.4.0 Cross-Platform Programming Tool Released

1 – GLSL Hacker Overview

Here is the first public version of GLSL Hacker. GLSL Hacker is my second cross-platform production (I quickly talked about it in this article) and like GpuTest, is available for Windows (should work on all versions from WinXP to Win8), Linux (developed and tested on Mint 13, should work with all Ubuntu-based distributions, I don’t know for other distros) and OSX (versions 10.7 and 10.8).

This version has not all features I wanted to add for a first version because I had to make a choice: either I continued the development or I released something. I chose the second solution. The development of a cross-platform software is a tough and time-consuming task. Especially when you have to deal with hardware accelerated rendering, multithreading, networking… That’s the main reason behind the lack of features (the main feature that is not present in this first version is the Python language)… But now that the architecture of GLSL Hacker is ok (or at least seem to be ok), I can now focuse my time on adding new features.

Ok so let’s quickly see what is GLSL Hacker. GLSL Hacker can be seen as the successor of GeeXLab. GLSL Hacker is based on a new 64-bit graphics library that is now my codebase for all my new developments (GpuTest is based on the same library).

GLSL Hacker is tool for exploring the world of 3D programming in an easy way. It’s a kind of sandbox where you can experiment new GLSL shaders, code your logic with Lua and/or Python programming languages (both languages can be used in a demo) and tweak and hack the code with live-programming (live-coding) tools.

GLSL Hacker supports all types of GLSL shaders available: vertex shaders, fragment shaders, geometry shaders, tessellation shaders and compute shaders. The shaders can be embedded in the main script file or can be stored in separate files, as you want. You can even store them on a web server and download them using some Python code.

The version 0.4.0 of GLSL Hacker includes the support of some built-in meshes (plane, sphere, torus), GLSL programs, 2D textures, Lua programming language and post processing (render targets). Next versions of GLSL Hacker will pack the Python language (I already have the python plugin for Windows, I just need to make it available for Linux and OSX), the loading of 3D objects (I guess I have a plugin for that too), the sound, PhysX 3 (yeah!), and many more features…

Multi-output demo on OSX

For the live-coding, I chose to provide network/TCP-IP based tools. You can then live code from a remote computer and the great thing is that the computer where the live coding tool is running and the computer where GLSL Hacker is running do not need to support the same OpenGL features. Actually the computer that runs the live coding tool does not need 3D graphics capabilities at all. The live coding tools use the native windowing system (Win32 API on Windows and Cocoa on OSX) and socket API. That’s all. So you can tweak an OpenGL 4 tessellation shader running on a Linux box from a MacBook Pro (that currently only supports OpenGL 3.2) and at the same time tweaking the Lua code from a Windows box…

Network based live coding tools

Live-coding a Linux demo from MacOSX

Live-coding tools are available for Windows and Mac OSX. Linux users can use Windows live coding tools with Wine, they work fine.

Two last things. GLSL Hacker is free. GLSL Hacker is my new sandbox for my 3D tests, and I don’t want to make a commercial product with it. Just download it and use it. Do whatever you want with it, except rent or resell it of course!

GLSL Hacker 0.4.0 is in alpha version so please be tolerant when you will encounter bugs, crashes and other weird behaviors…

2 – GLSL Hacker Downloads

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GLSL Hacker 0.4.0 for Windows 64-bit (XP, Vista, 7 and 8)

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GLSL Hacker 0.4.0 for OS X 10.7 and 10.8

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GLSL Hacker 0.4.0 for Linux 64-bit

Unzip the archive where you want and launch GLSL Hacker (GLSLHacker.exe for Windows, GLSLHacker.app for OSX and GLSLHacker for Linux).

And to explore the possibilities of GLSL Hacker, here is a code samples pack:

Hello, this app is great! Finally something to have fun with some advanced shaders standalone, not in a browser. I miss FXcomposer and RenderMonkey, but they lack of OpenGL4.x support is to big, your tool is just what I need 🙂 thanks.